Sex cults, nuclear silos and self-castration: inside the most jaw-dropping documentary on TV
What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen on television recently? Kim Cattrall’s “will this do?” cameo on And Just Like That? Tom winning Succession? Matt Hancock singing Ed Sheeran on I’m A Celebrity…?
Stand down Matt, and put away your hair-brush microphone. There is a new winner, though UK viewers must wait a little longer to experience it first-hand and in its totality. Last weekend, the comedy-documentary How To With John Wilson concluded on US network HBO after three sanity-distorting seasons. It went out with a bang, a whimper and a roar of unfettered derangement.
The cliche around American TV comedy is that it is mass-produced and formulaic. But US television has in the last decade conjured, essentially from nowhere, a new genre of comedy so insane it isn’t actually funny and is closer to staring into the maw of pure madness. The market leader is Netflix’s I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson. Essentially, it’s the Fast Show as scripted by HP Lovecraft – one sketch involved Robinson allowing himself be humiliated by a cheesy magician, only for his wife to take this as a cue to call time on their marriage. It starts funny and ends up bleak beyond all comprehension.
That’s also the trajectory pursued by How To With John Wilson, which has the simple framing device of Wilson, a former private detective and music documentarian from Long Island, tackling various subjects armed with a home video camera. Episode one is titled How To Make Small Talk and concludes with Wilson in Cancun infuriating an MTV crew and bonding with a lonely young man whose best friend has died by suicide.
There are giggles, but suddenly, Wilson is gazing into the void. Then, in year two, came How To Appreciate Wine, which ends up with Wilson reminiscing about the time he attended an upstate New York a capella convention frequented by sex cult leader Keith Raniere, founder of the notorious NXIVM group, which included Smallville actress Allison Mack.
Alarmed by Raniere’s “creepy” behaviour towards other a cappella singers, Wilson and his companions investigated his back story and discovered he was on a number of cult watch lists and that several NXIVM members had died by suicide. “We screamed at Allison Mack and Keith Raniere in front of the rest of the a cappella groups and scrawled the names of the suicide victims on the white boards they had set up on the walls,” he says on camera. The upshot was that Wilson’s college professor threatened to expel him if he didn’t apologise to Mack – which he did.
“I did have to have a frank conversation with the dean of my college at the time and try to explain to her who these people were and why they were so malicious,” Wilson told Vanity Fair. “She just didn’t believe me. I’ve had this weird shame ever since. All the alumni of the a cappella group were like, ‘Why did you get yourself involved in something like this?’” It’s just this insane drama that I never thought I would ever resurrect.”
This season, he tries to get buff by joining a gym – and, along the way, volunteers to be snapped in the nude, only for the photographer’s equipment to be stolen. He contacts a novelist who pens cat detective stories to help track down the missing camera – which somehow leads to a 9/11-themed body-building contest. Here, Wilson is introduced to a body-building instructor who reveals one of his former clients was a 9/11 hijacker.
“Made me feel proud,” the instructor says. “Made me feel good that I’d trained somebody for something committed that they were able to pull off. We may not agree with them, but they were committed. That’s what I liked about it.”
These exchange are bizarre with bells on. Sometimes, though, How Too… is surprisingly moving. In one instalment, having initially gate-crashed a gathering of pumpkin enthusiasts, Wilson winds up at the 37th Annual Vacuum Collectors Convention, hosted at a Marriott Suites in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Here, vacuum enthusiasts compete to suck up as much dust in as brief a time-frame as possible. One collector tears up when he recalls telling his father about his passion for vacuuming shortly before his dad’s death.
That Wilson could deftly yank the heartstrings was already confirmed in series one, where the entry How To Cook Risotto doubled as a mediation on Covid-isolation. With the pandemic descending, he tries to cook the perfect Italian dish for his elderly landlady. He fills up those empty lockdown hours fine-tuning his risotto technique – only for his landlady to be hospitalised. She later returns and he finally presents his risotto. It’s silly – until it is devastating.
The emotions are likewise flensed when, after told he can’t film at the Burning Man festival, Wilson meets a man trying to build a home beneath a vast former missile launch site – even though it’s driving his wife away. He also makes the acquaintance of a woman who has encountered two serial killers – after starting the day having his ears cleaned (only to be spooked by how loud New York sounds). As Wilson gawps, the woman clarifies that one of the killers was someone she just knew in passing. She was in a relationship with the other. “Sorry, I’m kind of hung up on this,” says Wilson. “You dated a serial killer?”
Nor will viewers quickly forget the notorious episode about covering damaged furniture that culminates with a conversation with a man whose business is regrowing foreskins for people who have undergone circumcision. At weekends, the anti-circumcision activist goes to karaoke bars and puts a pro-foreskin tilt on popular songs (“wouldn’t skin be nice”). If David Lynch put it in a movie, people would accuse him of going too far.
If you thought foreskin guy was dark, buckle up for the finale, with which Wilson has decided to close the entire show. It’s ostensibly a polite diatribe about personal deliveries going missing. We discover that the theft of Amazon deliveries is an ongoing issue in New York. One woman recalls ordering medication so her eggs could be frozen and sitting all morning on the stoop to ensure nobody swiped the package.
The constant throughout this is Wilson, who lays on his nerdy, stumbling speaking voice a little thickly. He also loves an obvious gag. For instance, investigating the challenges of delivering human organs, he “accidentally” ends up at a musical organ dealership in Arizona, which adjoins the vast Organ Stop Pizza restaurant. As he grabs a pizza and an organ materialises from the floor playing Abba, he strikes up a conversation with an elderly gentleman named Mike, who, it turns out, works for cryogenics company Alcor, which is headquartered nearby.
Freezing your body to be brought back to life at an unspecified future date is expensive. Mike reveals that some clients opt for the more cost-effective “head only” package. Later, attending a 50th-anniversary party for Alcor, Wilson learns more: one man says his mother and father are frozen and that he plans to join them.
“Of course, you would want to resurrect your parents if they were dead,” he explains. “This is like the Cadillac of getting frozen.” Then there is the woman for whom one body won’t be enough when she returns. “We need alternative bodies,” She says. “Very much like a wardrobe of bodies.”
The convention ends with Alcor executives singing “Freeze, freeze me, oh yeah” to the tune of the Beatles Please, Please Me. All of this, Wilson is obviously sending up at some level. But his facade never cracks. He maintains a gosh-darn curiosity throughout – like a gonzo Louis Theroux.
Yet even that facade crumbles when he catches up once again with Mike. Having come to trust Wilson, Mike reveals that, as a young man, he was haunted by his sexual urges. So much so that he decided to purge them via self-castration. “Removing your testicles in secret.. people think that’s crazy”, he shrugs, adding that when he is frozen, he has left instructions that “those things” [i.e. his genitals] not be reattached.
Is this comedy? Pitch-black documentary? A portrait of human sadness smuggled on to the airwaves? In a way, it’s all three at once. “The whole project of the show is very anthropological,” Wilson said this week. “I wanted to craft each episode so that the viewers could see part of themselves in each community somehow, no matter how specific their obsession is, because you see a lot of media out there that points the finger or mocks people with strange obsessions.”
Seasons one and two of How To… are on iPlayer, but UK viewer will have to wait for series three. It’s worth holding out for, however. At a time when so much TV feels that it is created for and by streaming algorithms, Wilson has made some daft and daring – a brutal comedy that lays bare humanity in all its eccentrics. But one which also comforts the viewer with the knowledge that, no matter how ill-equipped they may think they are for modern life, there’s always someone far loopier out there.
Wilson put it perfectly back in that first instalment, where he ended up in Cancun while trying to perfect the art of idle chit-chat. “The more you talk to someone,” he said, “the harder it is to hide who you really are.”
